Some hospital system executives are citing booming insurer stock prices as a clear market signal that consolidation will give payers the upper hand in future price negotiations with hospitals and other providers. But insurers are not the only ones seeing strong results.

Americans well remember how black people had to ride in the back of the bus and drink from separate water fountains before civil rights laws were passed. But most don't know that African Americans often could not receive treatment in the same hospitals and physicians' offices as white people.

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush called last week for a “phase out” of Medicare, which he said is not fiscally sustainable. But his statement contradicted a recent report showing that the fiscal future of Medicare's hospital trust has improved.

The Virginia Mason Institute in Seattle announced Thursday that it has won a five-year, $13 million contract to improve patient safety and control costs at five acute-care hospital trusts that are part of England's National Health Service Trust Development Authority.

Standardized mortality—the ratio of the observed number of deaths to the expected number in a given population—is one of a dizzying array of metrics used to evaluate hospital quality. A new study questions whether it should be.

In Colquitt County in rural southwest Georgia, nearly 80% of the people who signed up for healthcare coverage through a federal marketplace in 2015 were new to the program, according to county-level enrollment data for the federal marketplace recently released by the CMS.

Hospitals are increasingly adopting technologies aimed at reducing medication and other errors, but they continue to struggle with variation in the quality of care provided to patients and in adoption of safe practices.

Does the $16.2 million contract for lab software awarded to Cerner Corp. by the U.S. Army mean Cerner has a leg up on the multibillion-dollar Defense Department's electronic health record contract, or does it mean the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing?

Cerner Corp. announced Wednesday that the U.S. Army awarded it a $16.3 million contract for pathology department laboratory software. But Cerner and three others are vying for a much larger contract for an electronic health-record system across the Military Health System.

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